Is God approachable? Are you comfortable enough with your knowledge of God that you can approach Him with confidence? Because He did say you could.
Still, many struggle to pray, to engage in worship, and often feel like God is distant or absent from their lives.
Why is that so?
What keeps us from God
In Genesis 3, we see Adam and Eve hide themselves from the Lord who walked with them “in the cool of the day.”
8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
Genesis 3:8 (ESV)
Why did they hide?
Adam and Eve were motivated by shame and fear. They learned something about themselves and about God that was not true before they ate of the fruit of the tree. Sin gave them a new identity, but it was also a false identity.
They lost who they were and who God was.
9 But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
Genesis 3:9-10 (ESV)
Like Adam and Eve, we often hide ourselves from God in shame and fear. We buy into the lies that the enemy tells us about who God is and who we are.
We need to recover our true identity.
We need to see the goodness of God again and believe that He wants relationship with us.
How do we discover again who God is?
If we want to know who God is, we look at Jesus who is the exact representation of the Father.
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
Colossians 1:15 (ESV)
In Jesus, we see that God is good, loving, compassionate, kind, faithful, giving, patient, gentle, peaceful, filled with grace and truth.
His affections are set on us and in turn we can safely set our affections on Him. We can trust Him.
Jesus, through the cross, has done the work of reconciling us again to the Father so that we can be restored to the relationship God intended and established from the beginning.
He wants to walk with us again.
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